http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rabbani-guantanamo-prison-torture-20180726-story.html
cw: america is a shit country
boop boop
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...s-at-portland-rally-as-fears-of-violence-rise
"Gibson had earlier told the Patriot Prayer group that
a deal with police meant that they would not be searched in exchange for confining themselves to a barricaded area.
No weapons searches were carried out on the Patriot Prayer group."
all my eyes are rolling at this one, but id be lying if i said i was surprised. Really makes you wonder what free speech is if the police will assault you in the name of some terrorists' right to march through the city you live in with guns.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
"The tragedy for denialists is that they concede the argument in advance. Holocaust deniers’ attempts to deny that the Holocaust took place imply that it would not have been a good thing if it had.
Climate change denialism is predicated on a similarly hidden acknowledgment that, if anthropogenic climate change were actually occurring, we would have to do something about it.
Denialism is therefore not just hard work – finding ways to discredit mountains of evidence is a tremendous labour – but also involves suppressing the expression of one’s desires. Denialists are “trapped” into byzantine modes of argument because they have few other options in pursuing their goals."
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...s-infected-conservative-thinking-and-politics
"The plastic bag ban is not really about climate change, it’s about conservation – the tool conservatives such as Tony Abbott used to counter criticism they did not care about the environment.
It was the thinking behind Abbott’s Green Army, with that old-fashioned personal-responsibility aspect about it. Get out and plant some trees, pick up some rubbish and huzzah, look at me, I care about the environment, and unlike those greenies who just want to destroy jobs, I’m doing something that matters.
But sigh, no. Conservatives have been rendered so bereft by climate change that anything carrying even the slightest taint of an environmental impact is viewed with distrust. And so the plastic bag ban quickly became a new focus of the culture wars.
It’s all rather odd, but fits perfectly within a strain of thought that has decided the way forward is to ignore evidence and instead pursue an ideology of willful ignorance.
It has led to the point where there are barely any conservative commentators worth reading or listening to. It’s not that there are no intelligent conservative thinkers, but the lunacy of climate change denial and distrust of expertise has so infected the conservative media that prominence is now almost exclusively given to those for whom a worldwide conspiracy is more believable than reports by multiple universities and public agencies."
I don't even agree with the author about culture wars and plastic bags and conservation, but I go in for the argument that conservative ideology is motivated by fear leading to subsequent denials. 'fear is the mind killer' they say, and I think it really speaks to the way fear cuts off the imagination and abstract reasoning that a significant component of successful right wing ideology in America has been denying facts about, and solutions to, climate change, and continuing the energy lobby's agenda in the face of imminent ecological disasters.